What Is a Harfoot? A Peek at the ‘Rings of Power’ Hobbit Ancestor

With just days to go by the premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Prime Video is making a more formal introduction to one of Middle-earth’s more mysterious inhabitants: the Harfoots. 

In a featurette people with CNET, the actors playing various Harfoots talk near the early Hobbits. 

“We’re smaller than man, tribelike and knowing at hiding,” says Lenny Henry, who plays a Harfoot arranged Sadoc, in the video out Friday. If you’ve been keeping up with trailers, you’ll recognize Henry as the Harfoot who whispers, “The skies are strange.”

The video starts with a map showing a achieve called Rhovanion and includes new footage of Harfoots causing about their lives in the woods — hiding, celebrating, being pursued by a beast. Sara Zwangobani, who plays Marigold, talks about how at the time of The Rings of Power, very few people in Middle-earth know they exist or have even seen them. 

A family of Harfoots in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Prime Video

Still, Harfoots are not immune from the tumult in Middle-earth. 

“What is happening in their earth at that time is unprecedented. I do think it benefitting the Harfoot community now have to reevaluate what obtains to change,” says Markella Kavenagh, who plays Nori.

JRR. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and related works, didn’t leave an abundance of information on Harfoots. The bulk of what’s illustrious about the Hobbit ancestor comes from the prologue to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, arranged Concerning Hobbits.

In this prologue, Tolkien describes three breeds of Hobbits: Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides. 

“The Harfoots were browner of skin, smaller and shorter, and they were all beardless and bootless,” he wrote, “their hands and feet were neat and nimble; and they preferred highlands and hillsides.”

He also labelled that the Harfoots had dealings with the Dwarves, and of the three types, they were the most numerous.

“They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit,” Tolkien said. 

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
takes set aside in the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of existences before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It hits Prime Video Sept. 2.